Why do I need a node_modules folder?

[martin-braun]

I came here, because I want to generate a package-lock.json from a yarn.lock, because I want to use NPM instead of YARN. Obviously, I have not installed the dependencies yet and I should install them with a lock file. I tried to use synp, but it's only for someone who has already the deps installed, but why?

Shouldn't everything the package-lock.json needs be in the yarn.lock, already?

[antongolub]

Seems technically possible. But right now synp uses nmtree, that requires node_modules dir to be processed.